Crackdown to clean up Esplanade

KOLKATA: When you drive into Esplanade on Saturday morning, be prepared for a pleasant surprise - a skyline clear of the clutter of hoardings and ugly scaffolds. A sight many of us have not seen for years.
Keen on implementing chief minister Mamata Banerjee's dream to beautify Kolkata, mayor Sovan Chatterjee ordered civic workers to tear down hoardings in Esplanade from Friday itself.The crackdown will start at night, sources said. The mayor is learnt to have hardened his stand after some outdoor advertising agencies said they could not pull down hoardings on government and commercial buildings in the heritage zone. The mayor immediately asked municipal commissioner Arnab Roy to start the clean-up mission.
Roy deputed asked corporation advertisement department officials to pull down hoardings from Esplanade, Chowringhee and BBD Bag. Friday night's drive will target Esplanade and Curzon Park, say sources.
On Monday, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had asked all major hoarding agencies to pull down their billboards from BBD Bag to the Park Street-Jawaharlal Nehru Road crossing as the state government has decided to make this heritage zone free of clutter. The mayor gave them a week's time. According to a KMC advertisement department official, the hoarding agencies would have to pull down at least 100 large hoardings from this heritage zone.
However, on Thursday, owners of several outdoor ad firms wrote to the mayor seeking more time. They have come together under the banner of the 'Outdoor Hoarding Agency', and feel that a week's time is not enough to shift such a large number of hoardings from this zone. "Even if we dismantle street hoardings from BBD Bag, Esplanade and Park Street areas, we can't dismantle a large number of hoardings on top of high-rise buildings in such a short period. There are more than 60 such hoardings in the heritage zone which we cannot dismantle right now. There are several obstacles to pulling down these hoardings. First, we need a special demolition team to pull down the huge steel structures from high-rise rooftops. Second, we have to convince owners of these buildings who will have to bear a financial loss because of this decision. Finally, the festival season is drawing near and if we remove all hoardings at one go, we will have to face a huge revenue loss ahead of the season," owners of the agencies wrote to the mayor.
However, the mayor is not willing to wait till the Pujas get over. Sources in the mayor's office said on Friday that though Chatterjee was in favour of extending the deadline for dismantling hoardings from heritage zone by a week, he had asked the KMC advertisement department to start a demolition drive. "This prompted us to take up a special drive to pull down hoardings from Esplanade. We will dismantle more hoardings from Esplanade and Park Street," said a KMC advertisement department official.
On Tuesday, barely 24 hours after KMC served a notice on major hoarding agencies to dismantle all billboards and signposts that are choking the heritage zone, the firms - including Enkon, Selvel and Karukrit - engaged special teams to pull down billboards from BBD Bag. By the end of the day, more than 10 billboards and a few put up on bus shelters were removed, an official said. The agencies concentrated their demolition by the side of Laldighi, near Writers' Buildings and from Mayo Road to Park Street. However, Curzon Park and parts of Esplanade remained untouched on the first day.
A KMC official said it was tough to pull down hoardings from government buildings in places like Esplanade and Government Place. "We had given permission for scores of hoardings to be erected on the top of government and private buildings at Esplanade. The agencies need to apply special skill to dismantle huge structures from the top of high-rises," an official said. The success of the cleansing drive will depend on the civic body's effort to find alternative space for the agencies who have agreed to dismantle their hoardings from this heritage zone.
"If we ask any agency to dismantle or shift hoardings from a place, we have to give them an alternative site to compensate for the loss of business. In this case, it is difficult to find space for all the hoardings," said a KMC official.